


Sharp, Metallic

by nekare



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Canon what is canon, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, disregards canon after catws, we write fic like it's 2014
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-30 17:57:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19408423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nekare/pseuds/nekare
Summary: The day after leaving the hospital, still woozy on the massively high quantities of morphine they gave him, Steve dreams about a metal arm around his throat and warm, salty fingers in his mouth,justthe way he likes.The next day, there are plate marks on his throat, fading by the minute, and his breathing skyrockets as he touches them with reverence.Steve gets fished out of the Potomac, and Bucky comes to him.





	Sharp, Metallic

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this right before Age of Ultron came out, and then I just let it languish around after being jossed (literally) to all hell. But I kept thinking I should finish it over the years, and I finally got around to it. Also, I hadn't realized how much I missed post catws fic until I went back to this, truly a simpler, less wanky time. 
> 
> Thanks forever to [sablier_bloque](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sablier_bloque/pseuds/sablier_bloque) for the beta! <3

The day after leaving the hospital, still woozy on the massively high quantities of morphine they gave him, Steve dreams about a metal arm around his throat and warm, salty fingers in his mouth, _just_ the way he likes, the way Bucky knew he loved and teased him with before putting them inside him.

The next day, there are plate marks on his throat, fading by the minute, and his breathing skyrockets as he touches them with reverence.

\-----

Steve wakes up to cold, unmoving metal fingers around his neck and familiar thighs straddling his stomach. He’s alert in a moment, adrenaline surging.

“Bucky--”

“Quiet,” Bucky interrupts, eyes hard on Steve. He’s still wearing the same body armor, tacky with river water and sweat, hair tangled around his face. Bucky used to spend ages fixing his hair just so in the mirror, was so finicky that he would do both of their laundry because Steve never did it well enough for him. Steve walked in on him trying different rakish angles to wear his service hat in early 1942 and he was still teasing him about it through ‘44. This Bucky, careless about himself, makes Steve ache. 

"Who am I?"

"You're James Buchanan--"

"Shut up. Who am I _to you_."

Steve takes a deep breath. "You're -- everything. When I had nothing, I still had you."

Bucky hums slightly in assent, eyes still narrowed. His fingers unclench slightly before remembering himself and then they're pressing down harder on Steve's throat.

"The truth, Rogers. What is this," he asks as the fingers from his right hand drag along Steve's lips, digging into his mouth for a hot second before going back to just pressing down lightly on his lips.

Steve's eyes slip closed, breath suddenly erratic as he lights up, blood like thunder in his ears. The contrast between the soft warm fingers and the cold metallic ones on his throat drive him crazy, dick nudging against Bucky's ass where he's straddling him. 

He kisses Bucky's fingertips lightly, wetting them just so. "Still everything, Buck. We were -- each other's, I suppose. We never put a name to it."

"The museum didn't say so."

"The museum also got your birth date wrong and kept forgetting to change it every time I mentioned it." He shrugs as best as he can with Bucky's hands pressing him down onto the mattress. "Didn't seem right, letting everyone know when you didn't have a say in it. It was always _ours_ alone. And you were always particular about keeping it that way."

Bucky doesn't say anything, just tilts his head slightly, eyes assessing and harsh. Steve wants, more than anything, to touch him, to put his arms around him and sweep his hair back from his face, but he's not sure he'd be welcome. He keeps his hands to his sides instead, curled tightly into fists. 

When Bucky speaks again, it sounds almost lazy, a dreamy drawl. "So if I were to do this..." 

He doesn't quite take his right hand off Steve's face - rather, he drags wet fingertips down Steve's neck and chest, oh so slowly, until he wraps his hand around Steve's heavy cock over his pajamas, making him arch off the bed. His metallic hand is still wrapped around his throat, unmoving, keeping Steve tethered in the moment.

"Rogers," Bucky reminds him darkly, shaking him a bit like to a misbehaving animal. 

"Yes," says Steve in a rush. "Christ, Buck, of course it's a yes."

That must have been all Bucky needed, because then his mouth is hard on Steve's, pressing him further down on the bed as he bites Steve's lower lip, tugging it between his teeth until Steve lets out a shuddering sigh. He kisses back hungrily, coming alive at the familiar taste of Bucky on his tongue, something he never thought he'd have again. 

Bucky jerks him a few times, root to tip, harsh and almost painful with how intense it is, alternating between kissing Steve's mouth and licking and biting at his chin, the underside of his jaw. He finally lets go of his cock to move further down Steve's body to grind their hips together, letting out a groan against Steve's lips.

His metal hand stays around Steve's throat.

Forgetting to be hesitant, he puts his hands on Bucky's hips, the better to press him closer. Bucky leans down, his body a curve over Steve’s and his face close enough to kiss, which Steve does softly, lips barely brushing Bucky’s, at odds with the harsh rhythm of their hips. Surrounded by Bucky, all he can smell is the warm scent of him and the metal over it, so familiar it hurts, making his head swim. 

Bucky doesn’t fuck him, but it’s a near thing, once he roughly pushes Steve’s pajama pants down and starts grinding against him, his dick occasionally slipping into the warm space between his thighs, right behind his balls and brushing teasingly across his asshole, making Steve groan with how bad he wants it, how much he _needs_ it. Bucky doesn’t move his hand away from his neck until Steve is just about to come, dick pressed tight and almost painfully against Bucky’s dirty tac vest, and then suddenly the metal fingers are in his mouth, the taste so sharp against his tongue that it pushes him over that last inch. He whimpers through his orgasm around those fingers, helpless against it.

He’s completely mindless, after, overwhelmed with how sensitive he is as Bucky chases his own orgasm, his fingers twitching in Steve’s mouth as he comes silently with teeth on his lower lip.

They breathe together for a long moment, Bucky bowed over him and his wet fingers on Steve’s cheek, his hair brushing and tickling his face. Steve rubs little circles over Bucky’s hip, soothing the bruises he’s sure he left behind, eyes closed and head tipped back, still offering himself up. Then Bucky moves to get up and Steve, in a panic, surges forward and tries to grab onto him, only for Bucky’s metal hand to press him back into the bed once more by the throat, tight again, like he’d forgotten to do in the last few minutes.

“Stop,” Bucky says, voice steady and toneless, a world of difference from the thick Brooklyn accent he still hears in dreams sometimes.

“You don’t have to leave, Buck, you can just--”

“ _Steve_ , stop.” It’s mostly his name on Bucky’s lips that makes him go still, heart rabbiting out of his chest. Bucky is looking down at him intently, lips pursed, and when he seems convinced Steve will stay put, he climbs off the bed in one fluid move, tucking himself back into his pants unselfconsciously. Steve, still on his back with his pajama pants dragged halfway down his thighs and come drying on his belly and cock, is torn between wanting to cover himself and blush or to open his legs further, show Bucky the mess he made of him and remind him that _he_ did that, that there is a part of James Buchanan Barnes alive and awake in this room, the part that recognizes and wants Steve still.

He settles for just lying there, too anxious to move, holding Bucky’s eyes until he turns around and walks out of the room. He then gives in and curls himself into a tight ball on his side, replaying every touch and every smell and every kiss as he listens to his apartment window opening and closing, and he thinks, desperately: _there is hope yet_.

\----

He spends the next few days in a daze, wondering if he didn’t actually imagine it after all, too restless to concentrate on anything but longer and longer runs. Not for the first time he wishes he would still bruise like a normal person, that the hand imprint on his neck had stayed for longer than those few hours, if only to know it really did happen.

\----

Far as Steve could remember, Bucky had always worn the little medal.

“This?” he said at age eight, squinting down at the little raised imprint of St. Sebastian. “Always had it, I think. It was my father’s - he says it kept him safe during the war, you know. So he gave it to me when I was born,” he said with a little shrug.

Steve was still young enough that he felt a stab of envy at that, at the thought that apparently _his_ father had had nothing of the sort of keep him safe. His father’s absence was still a constant ache to keep prodding at like a missing tooth, stil a heavy burden on his shoulders. By the time his tenth birthday came, he already realized Sarah Rogers was all the mother and father he’d ever need, and that he couldn’t actually miss what he’d never had. It was what it was.

By age fifteen, the little medal stopped being a source of directionless envy only to become the center of the maelstrom of his lust for Bucky, the very focus of his pent-up want whenever he would get glimpses of it on summer days by the collarbones he wanted to nibble on; the cloying metal smell on his nose whenever Bucky would drag him close for one of his rough hugs, and the thing he’d want to pull on to get Bucky nearer whenever they roughhoused, flushed and panting and far too close to each other.

\---

The next time, he wakes up as soon as Bucky enters the room, barefoot on the hardwood floors. He goes up on his elbows, but he stays put and waits for Bucky to keep moving closer after a short pause in the doorway, until Bucky is kneeling above him again, rigid and tense. He’s holding himself carefully from touching Steve at all but he’s betrayed by the way his body curves into Steve’s, yearning contact. Steve bites his lips and gives him his distance, eyes roving over Bucky’s sunken eyes, the wet hair that drips on Steve’s forehead.

“Used your shower,” Bucky finally says, surprising Steve.

“That’s fine,” he manages to say.

“Rogers--”

“Steve. Call me Steve,” he sounds desperate to his own ears, but he doesn’t care by now.

“ _Rogers_ ,” he says again, a hint of annoyance and amusement edging into his voice. “I know you’ve been looking. Leave off it.”

“I can’t, Buck, I really can’t.”

"I suppose I shouldn't be surprised," Bucky says with a small shake of his head, and then he leans down for a kiss. They don't talk much, after that.

\----

“You always smell like metal,” Steve had said once, lying on the grass at night at Prospect Park, surrounded by half the neighborhood escaping the cloying summer heat.

“Sorry?”

“No, no, it’s good. It suits you.” Steve is too sleepy and hot to blush, but Bucky isn't, and Steve slides into sleep with Bucky's small, pleased smile and the red of his cheeks firmly on his mind.

\----

Bucky starts staying longer. It’s not like he lingers exactly, and it’s not like they really talk, despite Steve bursting at the seams to do so, but he doesn’t leave as soon as he comes, either.

The first time he calls him _Steve_ unprompted during sex, Steve could almost cry, and he does end up doing just that the one time he lures Bucky in for sleepy, slow, shower sex after Bucky shows up sweaty and shaking with receding adrenaline after one of the mysterious missions he refuses to talk about. They seem to run roughly parallel with Steve’s own, though, so he’s not that worried about them.

“M’kay, Stevie,” he says, eyes closed and loose with orgasm, his flesh arm still around Steve's neck as they rest against the tile. He stiffens as he feels Steve inhale sharply against his neck, but he doesn’t move away when Steve clings harder, or when he starts sobbing. 

They sway together, under the cooling water spray, for a long time, until Steve has stopped shaking and Bucky is practically asleep in his arms, his pruned fingertips resting lightly on Steve’s neck. 

\---

It always seemed inevitable with them. At seventeen, Bucky was golden and broad from the sun and the heavy lifting at the grocer. Steve, at sixteen, was so slight the wind could carry him away; fish-belly pale after months indoors from a bout of pneumonia. They put their arms next to each other to look at the contrast between them during that year’s heatwave, when they went swimming in the river, and the differences between them never felt as stark as in that moment.

Bucky glinted under the harsh sunlight, droplets of water dripping down his chest. His medal glinted too; it must’ve been hot against his skin, burning where it was usually just warm from his body heat. Steve looked, unable to take his eyes away from the water on his lips and lower to where it pooled at his collarbones and turned his thin shorts see-through.

When he dragged his eyes up, Bucky was looking at him, blushing hotly under the sun but holding his eyes. That night, cramped together in Steve’s rickety small bed as his Ma snored in the next room, far too old for it and knowing it, Steve told him he smelled like the river. He really did; a musky, deep smell, tangled with his normal, coppery scent. 

“What about it, Rogers?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re welcome to go get away from my stench, your majesty, if it’s such hardship,” Bucky said, aiming for offended, settling for sleepy, as Steve laughed at him and kicked lightly at his shin. “Should kick you off the bed, you ungrateful shit. See if I ever take you swimming again.”

But he didn’t say anything when Steve went to sleep with his face by Bucky’s collarbone, the tip of his nose brushing every once in a while at the chain around his neck.

\----

Natasha notices first, because of course she does. 

“You’ll get a chill with all these open windows, old man,” she says, pointedly shutting them closed. It’s such a mundane, normal statement, but there’s something in the way she says it, in the way her eyes sharpen, that tells him exactly what she means. 

“I can take a little cold,” he says, still wiping down the mug he was about to give her, wondering just how much is his face betraying him. 

“I know you can, Steve. Just. Be careful.”

He nods and she nods and he hands her her coffee and they watch Community with the sound on low as they plan their next operation. 

When Sam finds out, it’s not as half as easy, but that might have to do a lot with the fact that Bucky almost tosses him down the stairs when Sam barges in unannounced. So Steve sits on his hands and shuts his mouth and takes all the yelling Sam has in him, staring at the dark bruise showing up on his chin. 

Bucky doesn’t show up for weeks, and the next time Steve sees him is when Bucky’s pushing Sam out of the way from a sniper they’d all missed in a former HYDRA warehouse. Sam gets a sprained ankle, but he’s not dead, and Steve gets dizzy with how thankful he is, from how bad it could’ve been. Bucky doesn’t say a word, but he finishes the mission by their side, a silent, blood-soaked figure in front of them that causes more fear among the HYDRA personnel than Steve has ever seen directed at himself. 

“So, your boy might not be that bad after all,” Sam says, winded to all hell as they go out into the pale dawn light. Bucky’s still close enough that he must hear it, and Natasha’s snort after that, but he makes no show of it, just keeps walking away from them until he’s shrouded in the morning mist. “Still a dick though,” Sam adds.

“Can’t fault your logic there,” Steve says with a small smile as Nat moves under Sam’s other arm to share the weight. They hobble away, and they’re bruised and tired and aching, but Steve could float away with how very light he feels.

\---

Bucky starts rubbing at his chest, right on the spot the medal used to sit on his skin for most of his life. He’s clearly not doing it consciously, because he makes a confused, somewhat bereft expression every time he does it, right before his face goes blank again. 

Steve almost considers getting him a new one, goes as far as braving questions about gifts for a special someone in a small jewelry shop near his apartment, but the idea doesn’t really sit well with him. The little medal had served its purpose, after all.

He compromises by slipping a pair of his own dog tags over Bucky’s neck before he can leave one day in September, and Bucky just makes the face he used to make whenever Steve was being difficult.

“You’re so hard to shake,” Bucky tells him, sounding almost mad but holding tight onto the dog tags. He’s sitting on the windowsill, back in a tac vest and a red henley of Steve’s, which Steve pretends not to notice how it keeps disappearing. 

“You know me, stubborn as a mule.” Steve can’t stop his fingertips from touching the chain, from brushing lightly at Bucky’s neck. He still feels clammy with sweat, but he hardly ever allows Steve to touch him after he’s come.

“Can’t even ask you to stop, can I?” Bucky says after a long silence, clearly quoting himself, the Bucky of 1937 that had finally gathered enough courage for the both of them to kiss Steve after dinnertime in early June.

The memory blooms in Steve’s mind, those early days when everything felt possible, the one memory he’d never dared to hope Bucky would get back. He smiles like he hasn’t since forever, since before wartime, maybe. “You can always try, Buck.” 

\---

It happened like this.

Steve was up to his elbows in soapy water, right after dinner, and humming to the song playing on the neighbor’s wireless when Bucky came over and put his arms around him, and it was like an electric current, like the air in his lungs was leaving him all at once as Bucky mouthed at his neck, his hands clenched hard on Steve’s shirt.

“Bucky,” Steve managed to say before Bucky was turning him around and kissing him, open-mouthed and dirty and needy, the culmination of months and months of looks and touches and coded conversations in the dark from their opposite corners of the bedroom. Bucky groaned when Steve licked at his lips before biting them, and he crowded him against the sink as Steve’s arms went around his neck, trailing water and soap suds all over his collar, not that either of them noticed.

“How mad are you gonna be if I carry you over to the couch?” Bucky asked against his lips, his eyes closed and expression reverent. Steve laughed, and kissed Bucky once more, flash-quick, before tightening his arms around him.

“You can always try, Buck.”

That’s how their first time went, slow and soft as they laughed with their lips still brushing, hardly able to stop kissing as they rocked against each other side-by-side on their ratty couch, clothes only half off.

Their second time, two days later, was rougher, harder, with Steve still bleeding from his nose and Bucky’s side bruised to all hell and both of them seething with rage; Bucky because Steve had goaded yet another bully into a fight, Steve because he had to be saved yet once more.

They rutted on the floor, shirts bloody and unbuttoned, grasping at each other so hard they left new bruises under the old ones. They had barely made it through the door before falling on each other, and there was a circle of discarded shoes and pants around them -- Steve still had a sock hanging halfway off his foot.

Bucky’s nails scraped against Steve’s tender ribs and he groaned with the sharpness of it, eyes slipping shut.

“Yeah, you like it to hurt, don’t you,” Bucky snarled against his neck, his voice unkind. “That why you like getting beat up, Stevie? Huh?”

“No, not--not exactly,” Steve managed to say, voice pitching up after Bucky bit at his neck, at the soft underside of his jaw. It wasn’t that he liked being hit. But Bucky wasn’t exactly wrong.

“Then you just like the thrill, don’t you? Being so close to the edge?”

“Buck--” and Steve had to kiss him, he really did, because _yes_ , that was it, and he hated hearing it and hated that Bucky could see through him so easily but loved him all the same for _getting it_ , for still sucking on his lower lip and not caring that he tasted blood, or that Steve was being just as rough with him as he dragged him closer.

Bucky gave his lips a last nip before raising to his hands and knees bracketing Steve, eyes fevered and bright. 

“Well then, in that case,” he said and put his fingers in his mouth, getting them good and wet before roughly turning Steve onto his stomach and sliding a finger into Steve, not quite slow and not quite gentle but just what he needed right then, as he writhed on the floor with Bucky’s fingers up to the knuckle inside him, Bucky spitting messy and dirty right into his hole to help himself along. He came biting down on his lips, face down on the floor, ass up, his back a deep arc, Bucky’s fingers still moving maddeningly inside him. 

When he got his wits back, Bucky was dragging his cock against Steve’s ass, fast and desperate as he practically blanketed him whole, arms bracketing him with his medal dragging up and down Steve’s sweaty back. Steve ground back against him until Bucky came on his back, going boneless and pushing him further down onto the sticky floor. It hurt to breathe, a bit, but it was the same kind of hurt as the one in his ass; a tangy, sharp feeling at the tip of his tongue, right on the edge of pain and arousal, so different to the usual hurt and ache of illness.

“Fuck you, Steve,” Bucky said muffled against his neck, the fight gone out of him.

“I know,” Steve murmured sleepily as he shifted them until they were lying side-by-side, limbs awkwardly entwined.

“Goddamn you. And your stupid pride.”

“I know, Bucky. Sorry.”

“Can’t even ask you to stop, can I?”

“You can always try, Buck.”

Bucky shook his head and bumped his forehead against Steve’s, eyes falling shut for a moment. “Come on. Let’s get some ice for your nose.”

They did and then spent the next hours in companionable silence, arms brushing as they tried to clean blood and come off their shirts.

\----

Bucky’s St. Sebastian was lost way before the train in the Alps. It survived a rowdy childhood and basic training and days of being tucked into Bucky’s boot in Azzano, only for the chain to give in, of all things, as Steve pulled at it as he ground into Bucky in a dark alleyway in London while on leave. He didn’t even feel it snap - he had spent the better part of a decade pulling at it during sex, but it had been a month since they’d been able to be together, and he was crazy with it, so desperate he forgot how strong his new body was. 

They only noticed it afterwards, as they breathed harshly in the dark. By then the sirens were going off, and the blackout made it impossible to look for such a trivial little thing, no matter how bad Steve felt and how much Bucky pretended it was fine.

And Bucky did try his best to pretend he didn’t mind. But it was easy to see how uneasy he felt without it, and he got into a habit of touching the place at his collarbone where it used to rest constantly, forgetting it was gone and giving a startled, alarmed look he tried to squash down every time he saw Steve’s face fall in return.

Later, Steve thought desperately about it as he tried and tried and tried to get drunk in a half-crumbled bar. It had protected his father and it had protected Bucky and now it was gone, and Bucky with it, and Steve would never smell the unique blend of Bucky’s skin and warm metal ever again.

\----

Seven months after getting fished out of the Potomac, Steve turns around halfway through doing the dishes and Bucky’s already there, knee up on the windowsill and fingers lifting the blinds with a wary look in his eyes.

“You have shitty neighbors,” he says. 

“Yeah, well, the former ones turned out to be spying on me, so all in all, I can take the odd rowdy party.”

Bucky throws a heavy manila folder carelessly onto Steve’s coffee table, still looking out of the window. It’s a long list of HYDRA facilities - yellowed pictures, memos, redacted documents. Bucky’s late 20th century writ in dispassionate, clinical Cyrillic that parses into English and finally SHIELD stationery. 

“So what do you say, up for a little hunting?” He’s holding himself differently. Still colder, definitely, more closed in than the Bucky at 20 - but just as angry, as alive, as the Bucky at 26. A world of difference from the man in the helicarrier.

Steve’s hands are still covered in soapy suds as he drags him closer by the front of his hoodie, and it’s like coming full circle when he kisses Bucky’s mouth, soft, the fading sunlight bright behind his eyelids. He can almost taste the metal scent coming off him, as familiar as breathing, with Bucky’s new arm around his waist and Steve’s old dog tags hanging from his neck.

“For you, Buck, always.”

Bucky stays, that night. He doesn’t really quite leave after that.

**Author's Note:**

> You can also find me at [my newly minted twitter](https://twitter.com/nekare_ish), come cry about Bucky Barnes with me! :D


End file.
